


The Other One

by Walkerbaby



Category: Life on Mars & Related Fandoms, Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-11 14:00:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/479285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Walkerbaby/pseuds/Walkerbaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not just the police and the criminals that bleed though to 1973, sometimes it's the victims as well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Other One

**Author's Note:**

> It belongs to the BBC and Kudos

Title - The Other One   
Rating - R/Green Cortina with pink racing stripes. (Suggested violence, sexual situations suggested including non-con, ect. Adult subject matter)   
Disclaimer - Not mine. It all belongs to Kudos I just like to dream.   
  


He’d gotten used to seeing them sometimes. The others, Sam thought of them that way - the others. The ones he’d left behind. He’d seen his mother, his father, his Auntie Heather, colleagues, criminals, all of them. It hadn’t stopped when he’d returned to 1973 from 2006 - it never stopped. 

He saw some of them start careers in crime and tried to stop them before it got out of hand. Some of them were teenagers, vandalizing cars and lifting records from the shop. Others were children, still respected police officers in some cases. Crims and coppers, the good and the bad, all of them ended up here in 1973. 

Some of them were confused, the ones that had no life in 1973, the ones that remembered 2006 or in some cases 2007. Sam suspected they were the ones that had no bodies to return to in 1973 - it didn’t explain why he was here like this and not as a child - but everyone who was confused hadn’t been alive then. They had lives to slot into though and just like Sam most had adjusted well and he washed his hands of them - knowing one day soon they’d make a mistake and he’d arrest them just like he’d always done. Cleaning the gutters out, as Gene so astutely called in. 

Rarely - very, very rarely - Sam saw the Others. The ones he’d always hated to face in 2006, the ones he still hated to face in 1973. They were never confused, or perplexed or hopeful, they - the Others - were like they always had been - resigned to their fate. "You can’t save someone who doesn’t want it," his first partner had told him when he’d been a 19 year old plod in uniform. It hadn’t stopped him from wanting to. It didn’t stop him now from drinking himself into a stupor every time he saw one - knowing that somehow he’d failed them because they were here now and that meant they weren’t in the future. 

The worst, the one he’d stayed drunk for a week over, was her. Sam poured another drink and stared grimly at the blank television screen. The Test Card Girl had kept her distance since then - just like a woman Sam thought, when you want her she’s never around. Her, Cinderella, the little match girl, the saucer sized chocolate eyes that haunted his dreams. He’d failed her his entire career. 

Sam’s first house call had been a week out of the academy. The wake up call to the realities of policing, his partner had called it. 19 and full of righteous vigor when they’d been called to the scene of a domestic dispute. Broken out windows, and fist sized holes in the door, he’d helped separate the man from the red faced woman with the blackening eyes and the smashed nose while his partner had walked the drunk husband round the block. Didn’t want to press charges, never did his partner would assure him later, and told Sam she’d been the one to start the fight and had it coming. He’d kept his eyes averted from the blood stains on the skirt of her housedress and that was how he’d seen Her first. Hiding behind the sofa, all of seven years old, eyes the size of moons and tear tracks down her cheeks. It was the first time Sam had gotten drunk since before he entered the academy - it didn’t blot those eyes out from his dreams. 

Two years later and he’d caught fleeting glimpses of her during the frequent calls to the house. He’d had a new partner by then - one less inclined to think that the occasional slap was good for a wife - and when Sam had spotted the bruised jaw and the red marks on her arms his new partner had called in for Protective Services and stood back, watching, as Sam earned his first and only Aggressive Force Citation. The partner later testified that he’d never seen Sam touch the man except to help him - after all the filth had been so drunk he’d fallen down his own front stairs resisting arrest. If they hadn’t gotten the full medical report back to tell them that the bruises Sam had seen were only the beginning of extensive injuries there would have been more investigation into the complaint. As it was Internal Affairs wrote the event off as the suspect sustaining four broken ribs, a kicked in face, and shoe print bruising across his torso as a drunken fall down the steps during arrest. 

Sam had almost forgotten about her until five years later. Somehow the father had gotten out of prison and through a buracratic slip up had returned to the home with her and her mother -unnoticed by Protective Services. On Sam’s first case as a detective they’d raided a sex club that dealt in young girls. During questioning the club manager admitted the girl’s father had sold her for a dime bag and two cases of beer the year before. 

When he’d made DI they’d gone to celebrate and somehow ended up in one of the seedier strip joints in town. Not Sam’s scene but he was single, overworked, drunk and not a little horny. That had changed as he watched her lap dancing for two older men in bad suits with greasy comb overs three tables over. Instead of celebrating, newly minted DI Sam Tyler spent the next half hour vomiting in an alley. The nightmares haunted him for almost a month. It cost him two different girlfriends, he’d gotten what one deemed a monumental case of Mr. Floppy and couldn’t explain that it was all the result of a girl whose name he didn’t know in a strip bar six months before. 

He’d let her out of lewd behavior citations multiple times after that. Quietly arranging to have her released during vice roundups when she was caught. He knew the areas she worked and sometimes, against his will, DI Sam Tyler found himself going to a chippie that used too much grease and had stale vinegar as an excuse to just watch, his heart breaking silently with every car that slowed beside her.

She’d taken him by surprise that way one night and Sam had considered himself lucky that he was distracted and his reaction time slowed as a result - otherwise he’d have hurt her before even thinking about it. Instead he’d ended up with his back against a wall in an alleyway with her on her knees tugging at his zip. "No," he’d whispered running fingers through hair he’d remembered in pigtails. "You don’t have to do this." 

When she’d looked up at him then he’d read the confusion clearly in her face. Her complete lack of understanding as to why, why a high ranking police detective was helping her, getting her out of trouble and he’d just rebuffed the only reason she could understand. He’d been on his own knees, looking her in the eye and cupping her cheek before he understood it himself. "You deserve so much more than this," he said softly. "So much more." 

By the time he’d reached DCI no one mentioned his odd fascination with her anymore. The way she was always silently slipped from the cells during vice round ups, the way calls about violence in the clubs she worked was always handled personally even if it wasn’t his team’s case. It was accepted as one of the DCI’s quirks. Those that had known him for a long time swore that there was nothing sexual between Tyler and the girl but they kept it from DI Roy all the same. Everyone had a skeleton in the closet and while rumor abounded (sister, extended family member, family friend, current lover, former lover, first true love, ect.) no one ever pried into the exact nature of what tied normally iceberg cold DCI Sam Tyler to her. 

When they found her dead in an abandoned warehouse in July 2007 all of Sam’s old colleagues who’d known breathed a sigh of relief. At least he hadn’t lived to see this. No one knew the connection between the deceased DCI and the now dead girl but as two of the plods were quietly sick outside because of the brutality of the scene everyone silently agreed what lay in front of them would have unhinged him in ways too painful to imagine. 

Gene tried to pay attention to what Carling was telling him. "Pretty clear cut case Guv," he said as he puffed on a smoke. "Neighbors say that the husband always did have a temper. Said she was sporting bruises more than not. More he drank, more she was hobbling the next day at the market. No one’s surprised it ended like this." 

Like this, Gene thought, being her dead body lying in the street with window glass littered around her. Like this, was that her dead beat, no account tosser of a husband had come home pissed from the pub and declared the chicken to be too dry for his taste and the potatoes lumpy. Like this had ended with him throwing the poor, tiny little thing through the front glass window like a cricket ball and two floors down to the street below. Like this was his normally professional DI and partner kneeling on his knees next to her, tears streaming out of his eyes like a poofter as he stroked her face like a ruddy broken china doll - Gene tried not to focus on just how apt the comparison was. 

"I’m sorry sweetheart," his DI was muttering through quiet sobs. "I’m so sorry. You deserved so much more than this." 

He’d pulled Tyler up then and hustled him to the Cortina. Best to get the nutter off scene before the press arrived, and with a murder this public Gene knew the press would be there any second. Left instructions with Carling on how to proceed with the scene and hustled Sam off to the Railways Arms for a bottle or two to kill. Back corner table and a full bottle of scotch. One glass and if Sam had been with it he’d have shot the Guv an incredulous look. Instead he just poured himself shot after shot, finally giving up and just drinking straight from the bottle like some boozer as Gene smoked his way through two packs of fags and stared at the haunted figure in front of him. 

He didn’t know who the victim had reminded his overly sensitive picky pain DI of but he knew the feeling crushing him now. Maybe she reminded him of no one; maybe it was just the final straw of seeing one of them - one of the Others - that had pushed him to this state. Gene could understand. For all he and Tyler disagreed one thing they had in common was the hold that the Others had on them. They weren’t coppers, they weren’t criminals, they were the victims you couldn’t save, the ones you watched suffer over and over till it ended like this, the nightmare that both of them and every other decent copper shared.


End file.
